


the light has changed

by lunessie



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Female Percy Jackson, Genderbending, Genderswap, Not Canon Compliant - The Trials of Apollo, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:48:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22235848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunessie/pseuds/lunessie
Summary: Fem!Percy/Apollo: For as long as Percy can remember, she’s had dreams of a man that seems to catch the sunlight, the smell of hyacinths in his hair. She’s also had dreams of falling out of the sky, dying in a storm of waves and feathers. It’s just her luck she’s lived two past lives in a row. But third time’s the charm, right?(In which Percy Jackson is the reincarnation of both Hyacinthus and Icarus, and all of her worst nightmares consist of a god whose love never fails to kill her.)
Relationships: Apollo/Percy Jackson
Comments: 34
Kudos: 510





	1. blood in the water

**Author's Note:**

> “I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.”
> 
> //
> 
> “Never regret thy fall,  
> O Icarus of the fearless flight  
> For the greatest tragedy of them all  
> Is never to feel the burning light.”
> 
> — Oscar Wilde

White-hot wax against her back. 

A salty sea breeze. 

Blood pooled beneath her feet. 

A strong wind beating against her head. 

Percy Jackson dies like this—

* * *

She has these dreams, you see. Recurring ones. In them, she is always, always afraid. Some nights, she falls straight out of the sky; other nights, she gets her head sliced open. Every time, she ends up dying.

(And there is always a man there — the same beautiful man, with a broken smile. She never gets any answers out of him, but the whole world is in the way he forms his words, and the sun seems to take a step back as he walks into the light.)

She doesn’t know, really, what the dreams mean, but they happen often enough to where she knows they must be significant. She knows they must mean _something_ , even if she can’t quite grasp their meaning. She only really remembers flashes of them when she wakes up.

There are two nightmares that she often gets. The first one isn’t so horrible at the beginning — she’s in a field of flowers, and flowers have never been associated with anything bad. She’s wearing some weird tunic thing, too loose considering how windy it is, and there’s a man laughing beside her, twirling a metal disc between his fingers. His face is blurry, too blurry to make out clearly, but she can recognize his laughter anywhere, and she _knows_ his smile. She knows it like she knows her own soul. His existence withers into light, and liquid gold seems to fall from his eyelashes. The sun aches a tender hole in the sky, starcrossed at the edges, blurred and static. Golden light seems to fold across his fingers, and Percy thinks she can hear his name whispered by the wind, though she never catches it quickly enough to remember it when she wakes up. 

It’s not a terrible image at all, and the boy holding her waist is lovely — he has teeth straight out of a toothpaste commercial. A crown of a smile. Eyes that scream Hollywood star. He’s the type of guy with a leather jacket, the type of leading man Percy’s seen in the old movies — just on the edge of something cocky, but gentle enough for the audience to care about him. It’s a dangerous thing, being so pretty, but Percy can _feel_ how much she loves him; how much he loves her.

(And then there’s a _sting_ just above her left ear, flowers growing out of her throat, and blood spattering across the man’s face, frozen in a smoky, teasing smile.)

In her second dream, Percy is far more defiant. Less in love, more wanting. Desiring, maybe — not the nameless man, exactly, but something close to him, something similar. She’s chasing after a warmth she can’t reach, a light that’s changed. Percy thinks perhaps this is meant to be a temporary fix for something she can’t name, although she has no idea what’s broken inside of her. But Percy stares and flies straight into the white, burning eye of the sun, and the universe grits its teeth and stares back.

And then she falls and falls and falls, through sky through feathers through ocean, until she’s swallowed and crushed on impact, curled between a sea monster’s teeth. It always takes her longer than it should for her to recognize that she’s plunging to her death, considering how many times she’s gone through this nightmare. It’s still never enough time for her to prepare for the impact. The waves kiss her body, shatter her bones. The sea breaks underneath her back. Everything does eventually. Percy’s hands reach up desperately, grabbing, trying to hold on. The warmth slips right through her fingers, just like the sun she was trying to reach, just like the man’s smile.

And then she wakes up, just like she always does, clutching tightly onto the sapphire pendant her mother gave to her on her tenth birthday, careful not to let the treasured, expensive present fall through her slippery fingers.

Now, Percy is twelve years old. It’s dark, and half of her face is hidden underneath her blanket, but her eyes watch intently as the clock by her bedside winks into midnight. 

She can hear her mother’s soft breaths from next door on the other side of the wall.

( _“_ _Persephone,”_ her mother decides, looking at the black tufts of hair, the tiny hands peeking out from the blanket. _“In the hopes of taming even the darkest god.”_ )

Color bleeds into the black of Percy’s eyelids as she rubs at her forehead. She has a pounding headache, and she thinks she can still hear saltwater rocking inside of her ears.

( _“The myths were never about divinity,”_ Percy’s sixth grade English teacher tells them, after a particularly biting remark made in class, _“they were about humanity.”_ )

Percy was born in the summer, and according to her mother, her dad is lost at sea. She wonders how much she must resemble him. Does she have her father’s eyes, his nose? When she laughs, does it sound like her dad’s? When she smiles — is she a spitting image? 

She doesn’t know. But she imagines that the day she was born, it rained.

( _“Make me humble,”_ the man in her dreams sings. _“Whisper to me how love will ruin us.”_ )

Sometimes, she thinks she’s looking down at the earth from high above, and she’s sure she should be noticing stars flying past her eyelids, fireflies flitting between the trees, sparklers lighting up in the night. Instead, she sees wildfires burning, the wind rising, and Atlas falling to his knees, crushed beneath the weight of the world.

Her fingers feel numb suddenly. She shivers, and shoves her hands between her head and the pillow.

( _“Sometimes,”_ her mother whispers to her after another night of death, running her fingers soothingly through Percy’s dark curls, _“there are things life takes from you and in another life will give you back.”_ )

It should be a hopeful thing; a nice sentiment. But Percy thinks her mother just looks scared, the moment those words come out of her mouth. Like she knows something she doesn’t; like she fears something Percy can’t understand. 

When Percy first hears about the myth of Apollo and Daphne at school, she isn’t impressed.

“That’s a lousy story,” she says, although she’s noticed anything involving Apollo tends to be. “What’s the deal with him killing all the people he loves? That’s not what you do when you love someone. You don’t chase after someone who doesn’t want to be chased.” 

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, Miss Jackson,” her teacher says in exasperation, though she doesn’t seem surprised by the comment. “And most of these stories aren’t meant to be taken literally; they’re told with the intent to teach a moral or a lesson.” 

But Percy thinks it’s a pretty lame deal, being watered down to a mere ‘moral.’ Hyacinthus and Icarus and Daphne were humans before they were lessons. 

She doesn’t know why she feels so strongly about this subject, though — it’s not like anything she’s learned in school has ever been interesting to her, much less ancient Greek myths from eons ago. But Percy has always had a startling aptitude for understanding Greek words she’s seen etched in the statues and temples shown in her textbook, and she can describe Ancient Grecian civilization in a way that seems more vivid than the ruins on Google Images can capture. It’s bizarre, and Percy knows it makes her weirder than she already is, but it’s not like _every_ myth snags her attention — just… the ones involving Apollo. The sun god. The music man. The healer dude. _Whatever._ Percy can’t keep track. She thinks he’s got something to do with poetry, too, but she’s never been a fan. 

But, anyway, _Apollo._ Percy doesn’t know why, but whenever his name is mentioned, an odd tingle goes down her spine, and she starts getting sweaty, like she’s just run a marathon; and lightheaded, like she’s not getting enough air; and a little dizzy, too — like she’s supposed to be doing something, like she’s supposed to be _somewhere else_ , but she can’t remember, it’s not _clicking_ for some reason—

But Percy tries not to think about it too much, because it makes her feel sick, and it makes her heart go _kablooey_. That’s what always tends to happen for some reason, whenever Percy hears stories about lives that never existed, but lives she can envision like they were her own. 

When Percy first learns about the myth of Icarus in her fifth grade history class, she has to run to the trash can to throw up. When Percy first stumbles upon a photo of a Hyacinthus statue in a battered old library book, she gets so overwhelmed and heartsick she has to go to the nurse’s office. She gets a nasty headache, too, just pulsing at her left temple. 

Percy is not the type to paint despair pretty; she cannot describe the panic that follows her nightmares like an angelic hymn, and she cannot romanticise throwing up after waking, making it sound like a tragic romance where the fallen lovers are her and her own body. No, Percy is not a poet — but the poetry is in the memories. She’s read enough about them in school. 

She just had no idea they were talking about her. She figures it out soon enough, though, when her best friend grows hooves and her mom disintegrates right before her eyes. 

(Because that’s what happens when you decide to love someone, right? You love them, and then they die. Maybe she was too hard on Apollo after all.)


	2. which one of us is the tragedy?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Take one step towards the gods and they will take ten steps towards you.”
> 
> — Joseph Campbell

When Daphne dies, Apollo thinks it will be his undoing. He knows in retrospect that it won’t be — that the death of a god would take far more than the death of a mortal — but in that terrible moment of watching her hands turn to bark and her hair twist into flowers, Apollo thinks that _this_ is what it must feel like when humans go to die.

 _“Love hurts, sweetheart,”_ Aphrodite will tell him later with a smile, like her pretty face alone is enough to appease the loss of light in his chest. _“Isn’t this how the story goes?”_

And in the end, she’s right, isn’t she? Because the myths all end the same way, the years pass with only the faintest echoes of Daphne’s face, and Apollo is both relieved and disappointed to know that the world can and will continue to fall into sunlight without her. 

( _Question:_ What is the lesson here? 

_Answer:_ Gods can be dangerous when they are denied, and humans die when they try to play god.)

* * *

Apollo thinks maybe his eons-worth of suffering is the result of some old magic — the soulmate bond, perhaps. Legend has it that humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces. Fearing the power these creatures could potentially hold, Zeus split each mortal into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their entire lives in search of their other halves. Unable to look upon their immense pain and do nothing about it, Apollo took pity on them and eased their suffering. Zeus split them in half and Apollo sewed them back together. Perhaps his fierce and unwavering tendency to love and be loved is a reward from the Fates. Or perhaps this is the Fates punishing him for his kindness — Apollo has never failed to squander all chances he has at happiness. Nothing good ever survives from a god showing humanity. 

For centuries, Apollo’s dreams have been filled with gore and maggots; fire songs and wilting flowers. It doesn’t get better as time goes on. His heart still seizes any time he listens to the words of warning and sorrow and praise on the poets’ lips and in the Muses’ songs. The world takes notes from Icarus’ failure when they move on from wax wings to steel airplanes, and whenever a flight fails to take off and they still keep on trying, Apollo wonders whether mankind ever really _does_ learn from the gods’ examples. 

_“Know your limitations,”_ the philosophers caution. _“Obey your elders. Control your heart. Beware of the gods.”_ No one understands how love could ever be worth a life. The poets make a villain out of Icarus’ arrogance. They make a martyr out of Hyacinthus’ love. The world forgets the way Cupid chose Daphne because the potential for true love between her and Apollo was there. It forgets the way Icarus was a child who grew up punished for his father’s mistakes and imprisoned in a dark place devoid of all light. It forgets the way Hyacinthus was meant to be a king and a legend and a worse god turned him into the wrong kind. The world forgets the way all these tragedies were once human beings. 

They say the gods are foolish, but the gods are the only ones who remember the stories right. 

( _Question:_ Do we forgive it? Do we forgive violence if it comes from someone beautiful? 

_Answer:_ How else do you think the gods have survived this long?)

Hyacinthus was meant to be a prince and a hero and a beauty that defied earthly expectations. Instead, he took Apollo’s hand. That was his one and only sin, and in the end, he died for it. Icarus’ fate had been worse. _“I take my love to the grave,”_ Apollo can remember him screaming. But no grave could ever bury his own grief. 

_"You are always looking for love in the wrong places,"_ Artemis tells him, _“as if you are looking for someone to hurt you."_

And perhaps his sister is right. She always tends to be, but Apollo hardly ever listens. The reason history tends to repeat itself is because gods like him never learn. 

He finds his thoughts circling back to Artemis and her Hunters sometimes, and there’s always one memory in particular that stands out to him — of his eyes, melted solid gold dark; of his twin, sitting starkly against the hollow, cut moon. Apollo strikes a match with his teeth and lights the girls’ campfire as Zoë Nightshade looks upon him with undisguised loathing, and Apollo thinks she’s fortunate to be so hateful; to swear off all men when love has never done women any good. 

They say Aphrodite is the most beautiful of the goddesses, but whenever he takes a look at her face, he sees eyes the color of murder. It’s no wonder she and Ares get along so well. Her husband Hephaestus builds something close to life, but Aphrodite has always been more interested in breaking things apart. Relationships are never easy to fix after they’ve been broken; it’s why Hephaestus has never been able to hold on to her. A heart is the only thing he can never repair. But Ares is steadfast — violence and war will never change. That loyalty to chaos remains forever.

But Apollo is fickle. Why else does he have domain over so many things? Music, light, healing, poetry — he can never decide what he likes best, and that indecisiveness is dangerous when you have so much power. 

Maybe that’s why everyone he loves leaves him. Perhaps death is kinder for those cursed to capture his adoration. Apollo tells himself this whenever the guilt becomes more of a specter and less of a ghost, but he is aware he is only lying to himself. Death is never kind — not to him and most certainly not to his lovers — and it never fails to leave Apollo worse off than it once did before. 

Dionysus, however, is arguably the most miserable of the gods. It’s because he knows the tragedy that befalls when a human gives up their humanity. Just look at Hercules and all those who came before him — what good comes out of living forever? 

_“What love is worth godhood?”_ Zeus will sneer back — but a god who cheats on his wife and has never felt love at all could never understand. 

( _Question:_ How do you get involved with the gods? 

_Answer:_ Against your will and with great suffering.)

His father doesn’t understand. Artemis doesn’t either. No one really does. They don’t have the same memories he has: of the gentle strums of a lyre, of the _whapsnaphiss_ of an arrow released from its crossbow, of the sound of a laugh consumed by the ocean and the wind screeching for blood. The fall of a boy and the fall of a prince. Which one is worth more? Which one has the better moral? It depends on what story you want to tell. There are more tragedies than romances written about Apollo’s smile, but that just means he’s worth writing about. 

Despite his resentment, Apollo has never blamed Icarus or Hyacinthus for being dead, but he doesn’t give Daedalus the remains of his son and he avoids his sister and her flowers and her arrows for the longest time. There is only so much loss a god can take, but none of them have ever been fond of admitting weakness. Instead, Apollo takes up the ukulele. Isn’t that where the best ballads come from? He sings about Daphne and Hyacinthus and Icarus. He tunes his strings and hums a melody and pretends he doesn’t notice the acoustics of their screams rocket to the ceiling. He throws his agony into his music and hopes that maybe the other gods will hear it and see how his lovers have suffered.

With Hyacinthus, it was easy. It was the closest he ever got to a happy ending, but the finale still makes his throat close up. The memories of it weigh heavily in his chest, like a stitch he can never recover from. Most of the time, he can’t bear to think back on it. It’s all minty, crisp cigarettes and fresh, white teeth and fiery, burnt smoke. Hyacinthus turns into a carcass as his blood leaks into Apollo’s hands. This is the lesson humanity learns: that flowers are made for funerals; that Persephone resides in the Underworld for a reason. 

When Apollo spares a thought back to Icarus, he thinks about the old man Daedalus trapped inside a monster he created, and Apollo’s poetry turns into something that rots; something that burns. Icarus paid for the mistakes of his father, just as all demigods pay for the mistakes of their parents, but the lesson is never learned. What lesson is there to learn, really, when no one is even listening? 

Compared to the others, Apollo falls in love as easily as the sun slips into being; and unlike most, he can _feel_ when his threads of fate are being tied to someone else’s. He only needs to take one look at a person to sense whether he or she will become a future lover. He remembers each first meeting vividly, because he turns momentarily blind to everything but that face, those eyes, that beloved, his dear…

_DaphneHyacinthusIcarusCassandraCoronis—_

(Sometimes, Apollo digs his hands into the dirt and brushes his fingers against the graves and the trees and the flowers and wonders whether his dead lovers feel it.) 

But Apollo is a god, and so the world moves on. Centuries go by, and the love he once so easily fell into quickly turns into lust instead. It’s safer territory, leaving a broken heart behind rather than a broken body. Desire is kinder, so desire is what he focuses on. Just the mere sight of a collarbone can make it feel as if he’s just snorted a whole line of coke; it doesn’t take much anymore. Apollo beds Naomi Solace because he likes her country twang and the pun she makes about her last name. He finds something brilliantly charming about the daring smile that unleashes any time Darren Knowles shoots on target and tells Apollo to try harder. Apollo learns to like the chase that killed Daphne, to find savage pleasure in the tragedy that will befall Hermes and his favorite son, and to burn brighter any time his father shoots a plane down. It reminds him that all gods suffer; that not all mortals die because of Apollo’s favor — after all, what is it that the humans always say after their loved ones die? 

_“They would just light up the room. When they died, they took the sun with them.”_

Apollo is sick of being blamed. 

After Daphne, after Hyacinthus, after Icarus — rarely _ever_ does Apollo feel that intense, cruel sense of love for anyone else. 

And then he meets that sea spawn Percy Jackson, and thinks her fate is tragic _enough_ without his interference in it; without his curse weighing her down. 

But not unlike their past lives, Apollo is sinfully pretty and untrustworthy and desperately fond of Percy Jackson the moment he first lays eyes on her — and he remains blind to the way this story will end. 

(Apollo is the god of prophecy, but even _he_ could never dream up a future like this.)

**Author's Note:**

> This is very self-indulgent. Essentially, Percy is a reincarnation of both Hyacinthus and Icarus. I’ve seen a few stories explore the idea of Percy being Hyacinthus in a past life, but I’ve never seen one focused on the idea of her having been Icarus, so I decided to write one myself and see where it leads me. This story will loosely follow the events of the entire series, except for The Trials of Apollo.


End file.
